David C Lincoln Fellows, 2009–2010

The David C. Lincoln Fellowships in Land Value Taxation (LVT) were established in 1999 to develop academic and professional interest in this topic through support for major research projects. The fellowship program honors David C. Lincoln, former chairman of the Lincoln Foundation and founding chairman of the Lincoln Institute, and his long-standing interest in LVT. The program encourages scholars and practitioners to undertake new work in the basic theory of LVT and its applications. These research projects add to the knowledge and understanding of LVT as a component of contemporary fiscal systems in countries throughout the world. The 2009-2010 DCL fellowships announced here constitute the tenth group to be awarded. This program is administered through the Lincoln Institute's Department of Valuation and Taxation.

  • Leah Brooks
  • Assistant Professor
  • Department of Economics, University of Toronto
  • Byron Lutz
  • Economist
  • Fiscal Analysis Section, Division of Research and Statistics, Federal Reserve Board of Governors
  • Estimating the Regulatory Land Tax in Boom and Bust
  • Legal restrictions on the development of land create a wedge between the equilibrium market price and the observed market price. This wedge is an indirect tax on land. We use property level data from Los Angeles County from 1999-2009, along with rich information on the nature of land use regulation to measure the magnitude of this tax over the business cycle. We expect that this project will be the first to measure a dynamic regulatory tax and that our detailed measures of the components of regulation will provide useful guidance to policymakers about the relative importance of different regulatory tools.
  • Seong-Hoon Cho
  • Associate Professor
  • Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Tennessee
  • Dayton M. Lambert
  • Assistant Professor
  • Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Tennessee
  • Roland K. Roberts
  • Professor
  • Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Tennessee
  • Moderating Urban Sprawl through a Two-Rate Property Tax
  • Through land value taxation, municipalities can reform prevailing property tax schemes to moderate sprawl by reducing the tax rate applied to building values, while increasing the tax rate applied to land values. Such taxation schemes have been referred to as a two-rate property tax (TPT). This project is designed to evaluate the effectiveness of a TPT on compact development in sprawling metropolitan areas. The results from ex ante policy evaluations of TPTs on compact development will provide researchers, policy makers, and those who advise them a way to inform public policymaking in an important, useful, and easily understandable way.
  • Jeremy R. Groves
  • Assistant Professor
  • Department of Economics, Northern Illinois University
  • Estimating the Responsiveness of Residential Capital Investment to Property Tax Differentials
  • Despite the assumption that residential capital investment is reduced in the presence of higher property taxes as predicted by the New View of property tax incidence, there is little to no empirical evidence supporting this claim. The purpose of this project is to address this gap in the literature by using house level data from the Saint Louis Metropolitan Statistical Area to estimate the responsiveness of residential capital investment to property tax differentials. Capital investment is measured as the square footage of living space of new homes and regressed against property tax differentials and a set of house specific and census data controls. Preliminary findings show the elasticity, after controlling for the endogeneity of the property tax, to be about -0.14 equating a loss of seven hundred square feet for a one standard deviation increase in the property tax differential.
  • Nicolai V. Kuminoff
  • Assistant Professor
  • Department of Economics, Arizona State University
  • Jaren C. Pope
  • Assistant Professor
  • Department of Economics, Brigham Young University
  • Boom-Bust Implications for Property versus Land Value Taxation (A National Analysis Using Micro Data)
  • A key barrier to introducing a land value tax is the perceived risk associated with increased fluctuations in local property tax revenue. The primary objective of this project is to use a unique micro-level housing dataset of approximately 10 million homes that sold between 1998 and 2009 to estimate land values in localities across the United States. Combined with property tax rates and assessment practices, these local estimates of land value will be used to develop a counterfactual analysis that compares the actual local revenue fluctuations with the revenue fluctuations that could have been expected under a land value tax.
  • Elizabeth Plummer
  • Associate Professor
  • Department of Accounting, Neeley School of Business, Texas Christian University
  • The Effect of Land Value Ratio on Property Tax Protests and the Resulting Effects on the Assessment Uniformity of Land Values
  • This project examines the effects of a property's land value ratio on the probability and outcome of an owner protesting the property's assessed value, and the effects of these protests on the assessment uniformity of land values. I define land value ratio as a property's assessed land value divided by total assessed property value. The project uses parcel level residential property and appeals data for 2006 through 2009, obtained from Harris County, Texas. Statistical methods will be used to examine the effect of land value ratio on the likelihood that a property owner files a protest and on the percentage decrease in assessed value realized through the appeals process. I then examine whether these adjustments decrease assessment uniformity, thereby decreasing horizontal equity.